In case you haven't heard, the Thomas Nelson publishing company has decided to stop the presses on Barton's infamous book The Jefferson Lies, and pull all copies from distribution. Thomas Kidd, who broke the story yesterday at World Magazine, reports:
Casey Francis Harrell, Thomas Nelson’s director of corporate communications, told me the publishing house “was contacted by a number of people expressing concerns about [The Jefferson Lies].” The company began to evaluate the criticisms, Harrell said, and “in the course of our review learned that there were some historical details included in the book that were not adequately supported. Because of these deficiencies we decided that it was in the best interest of our readers to stop the publication and distribution.”I don't know who in particular contacted the publisher. But I do know that a number of historians and other scholars have done yeoman's work in demonstrating the evidentiary flimsiness and downright fabrications underlying many of Barton's claims.
John Fea, who blogs at The Way of Improvement Leads Home and who will be commenting on a panel at the fifth annual S-USIH conference this fall, has spent the past several months documenting and debunking Barton's distortions and outright lies. See especially his six-part series of blog posts analyzing Barton's historical argumentation. Type "David Barton" into the search window at the top of Fea's blog, and you will get a sense of how much time this highly-regarded professional historian has spent doing battle against (really bad) popular "history." In these posts you will also see that Fea frequently links to the work of other historians and scholars from a range of academic disciplines who have taken the time and care to refute Barton's propaganda -- scholars such as Stephen Prothero, Warren Throckmorton, Michael Coulter, Clay Jenkinson, Alan Pell Crawford.
Similarly, at the Religion in American History blog, historians Randall Stephens, Kelly Baker, Paul Harvey, Chris Beneke, and other contributors and commenters have situated Barton's work where it belongs: not as history, but as a particular (and particularly virulent) strain of right-wing Christian nationalist propaganda.
Barton's propaganda has never been aimed at swaying the judgment of the historical profession; though he has apparently been able to dupe the Texas board of education into accepting his propaganda as history, he is not writing anything that has a chance of passing muster with professional historians. People who practice critical thinking skills for a living are not his target audience. So professors at places like Messiah College, Grove City College, North Park University -- Christian institutions all -- might have been excused for doing what most of us do when we run across some of the laughable nonsense that sometimes passes for reliable history with popular audiences: as academics and professionals, they could have simply ignored Barton. Instead, they took the time and trouble to refute him -- drawing the predictably martyrological response from Barton that their criticism should be dismissed as the work of "academic elitists" who are attacking his "personal religious beliefs."
Presumably, the group of Cincinnati pastors who recently called for a boycott of Thomas Nelson publishing over Barton's book are not part of the anti-Christian academic elite. Bob Allen at the Associated Baptist Press reports that these evangelical pastors "were concerned that the book glosses over Jefferson’s heretical views about Jesus Christ and excuses him for owning slaves." In other words, they fault not only Barton's historical argumentation but the moral judgment from which it proceeds and which it supports. For them, Barton's work is not just bad history, but bad history in the service of bad theology.
Indeed, I assume that Barton's work is "bad theology" in the view of the many Christian academics and scholars who have taken the time and trouble to expose the propagandist's falsifications and distortions. In fact, I would surmise that their own pastoral and confessional concerns as scholars and teachers in faith-based institutions, their sense of responsibility to teach not only well but truly, might have spurred them to take on this particular vapid but vicious wolf.
As a historian, I am not the least bit interested in promulgating good theology or bad theology or any theology at all. I just want to write and teach good history. What is interesting -- and not a little problematic for me -- about this case is the way in which good theology appealed for support to good history, and good history emerged at least in part from a commitment to good theology.
Why do I find this problematic? Well, that has to do with a book review I have not yet written, and my reasons for not yet writing it. I will explain my problem in another post. For now, though, I would like to congratulate and thank these scholars and their colleagues for fighting the good fight and keeping the faith. I'm just not quite sure which faith or faiths they're keeping, and how they fit or ought to fit together. But this I know: if we are to judge a tree by its fruits, this latest small victory for good history tastes pretty sweet indeed.
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